ePub or No ePub, That is the Poll

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by llasram

What sorts of tools do the people who say they want better tools want?

I could use a user-friendly (but not too "smart") .opf and .ncx editor. Having to manually add and name every file in the manifest, and make sure everything is in the spine can be a pain... the same with the "playOrder" in the .ncx.

[Abisha]

Originally Posted by llasram

That's an AdobeDE limitation, not an EPUB limitation. Most other EPUB readers do full justification just fine.

Hmmm, so than is it my phsical reader hardware that is failing to display the epub in full justification? As a test, I downloaded "Animal Farm" in Epub format from our very own mobileread online library. I transferred it over to my PRS-505 and to my dismay there was no full justification.

Originally Posted by llasram

Also already a part of EPUB. In fact, it's the only format for which font embedding really works well -- if font embedding is important to you then EPUB is the format for you.

Unfortunately the tools that I've had exposure to have not presented to me the availability to embed fonts in epub. Perhaps they are commandline and I just need to research more on the topic. For the time being I've had fairly consistent results with embedding fonts in PDF, RTF, DOC, and LRF which are a necessity for me as a linguistic student. Any tips? I would love to make the switch to Epub knowing this will truly be the standard.

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by Abisha

Hmmm, so than is it my phsical reader hardware that is failing to display the epub in full justification?

Its the software (Adobe Digital Editions) which fails to support full justification, even in its Desktop version which certainly isn't hardware limited.

[llasram]

Originally Posted by Abisha

Hmmm, so than is it my phsical reader hardware that is failing to display the epub in full justification?

You may not have realized it, but the Reader's EPUB support is via a version of AdobeDE on the device. So like wallcraft said, same limitations.

Originally Posted by Abisha

Unfortunately the tools that I've had exposure to have not presented to me the availability to embed fonts in epub.

Calibre doesn't yet do direct font embedding (le sigh), but you can use some Reader-specific CSS tricks to get EPUB books you generate to use fonts you've copied onto the Reader.

Originally Posted by Abisha

Perhaps they are commandline and I just need to research more on the topic. For the time being I've had fairly consistent results with embedding fonts in PDF, RTF, DOC, and LRF which are a necessity for me as a linguistic student.

Oh, fair enough. I wasn't counting PDF as an e-book format, and didn't realize RTF had font embedding / supported it on the Reader. LRF definitely does it, but I was under the impression it could still be a bit chancy given our knowledge of the format, but I haven't looked at it in a while. By comparison EPUB font embedding is drop-dead simple -- include the font files in the ZIP archive and reference them via @font-face rules in the included CSS.

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by llasram

Calibre doesn't yet do direct font embedding (le sigh), but you can use some Reader-specific CSS tricks to get EPUB books you generate to use fonts you've copied onto the Reader.

This isn't quite as simple to do as you might think at first glance. What about source documents that specify font families of their own or embed their own fonts?

[vivaldirules]

Hugo Lefty: "Aren't you gonna say if you like the aliens or not?"
Lefty Hugo: "Do you mind if I wait until some at least land?"

[llasram]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

This isn't quite as simple to do as you might think at first glance. What about source documents that specify font families of their own or embed their own fonts?

Oh, I know -- that's part of why I haven't just jumped in and implemented it myself . I do think that supporting adding fonts and @font-face rules for 'serif', 'sans-serif', and 'monospace' would cover at least 80% of uses though.

[kovidgoyal]

There's actually a reasonably powerful class in the matplotlib source code that takes a CSS font family name and maps it to the "closest" font on your system. That could be used to take care of documents that specify their own font families.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by Abisha

Hmmm, so than is it my phsical reader hardware that is failing to display the epub in full justification? As a test, I downloaded "Animal Farm" in Epub format from our very own mobileread online library. I transferred it over to my PRS-505 and to my dismay there was no full justification.

The book does not specify any justification or text alignment, so the justification (or lack of it) you see is the reader's default. Whether this default can be changed or not is another thing.

If you use the provided index.zip (as explained in the post) to read the book in a web browser, you should see full justification. This is so because there is index.css on top of the book's css, and there you have "body { text-align: justify }". This "trick" is what I'd expect ePUB readers could use (i.e., have a user-configurable css), but apparently they don't (yet). Besides, it seems Adobe DE (and Sony) don't support full justification at all, even if it were called for by the book itself. But as others have said, this is not a problem of ePUB, but of the readers (well, ePUB's is to blame in that full justification is not a required feature, I think)

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Jellby

But as others have said, this is not a problem of ePUB, but of the readers (well, ePUB's is to blame in that full justification is not a required feature, I think)

It strikes me as a quite astonishing omission.

[mtravellerh]

Originally Posted by HarryT

It strikes me as a quite astonishing omission.

Absolutely. But didn't we have THAT discussion before, Harry? Well, we were on the same side, but the techie boys (including Hadrien and Kovid) were on the other!

[Hadrien]

Originally Posted by mtravellerh

Absolutely. But didn't we have THAT discussion before, Harry? Well, we were on the same side, but the techie boys (including Hadrien and Kovid) were on the other!

On which side ? I hate ragged right, I can only read fully justified text with good hyphenation. I can't understand at all why DE supports something as complicated as XSL-FO, yet doesn't allow the user to select this sort of things.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by Hadrien

On which side ? I hate ragged right, I can only read fully justified text with good hyphenation. I can't understand at all why DE supports something as complicated as XSL-FO, yet doesn't allow the user to select this sort of things.

Wasn't the question if it should be a required feature or not and to me it seems that requiring it will make it harder to implement viewers on some platforms.

[mtravellerh]

Originally Posted by Hadrien

On which side ? I hate ragged right, I can only read fully justified text with good hyphenation. I can't understand at all why DE supports something as complicated as XSL-FO, yet doesn't allow the user to select this sort of things.

Oops, sorry Hadrien. Coffee's on me.

[Hadrien]

Originally Posted by tompe

Wasn't the question if it should be a required feature or not and to me it seems that requiring it will make it harder to implement viewers on some platforms.

Justification is a very simple thing to support. Sure it might not look very good on small screens but even in a low ressource environment it's pretty easy to support.